This book is a feat of editing. It condenses aspects of Chomsky's talks from across decades and references them at a separate website, understandingpower.com. Here are some favourite quotes:

You should not expect an institution to say, "Help me destroy myself," that's not the way institutions function. And if anybody inside the institution tried to do that, they wouldn't be inside it much longer.


If you're getting accepted in elite circles, chances are very strong that you're doing something wrong - I mean, for very simple reasons. Why should they have any respect for people who are trying to undermine their power? It doesn't make any sense.


Part of the whole technique of disempowering people is to make sure that the real agents of change fall out of history, and are never recognized in the culture for what they are. So it's necessary to distort history and make it look as if Great Men did everything - that's part of how you teach people they can't do anything, they're helpless, they just have to wait for some Great Man to come along and do it for them.

If power is actually rooted in large parts of the population - if people can actually participate in social planning - then they will presumably do so in terms of their own interests, and you can expect the decisions to reflect those interests. Well, the interest of the general population is to preserve human life; the interest of corporations is to make profits-those are fundamentally different interests.


Either control over these matters is left in the hands of existing power interests and the rest of the population just abdicates, goes to the beach and hopes that somehow their children will survive - or else people will become sufficiently organized to break down the entire system of exploitation, and finally start putting it under participatory control. One possibility will mean complete disaster;
the other, you can imagine all kinds of things. For example, even
profitability would no longer be all that important - what would be important is living in a decent way.




As the first Secretary of the Air Force, Stuart Symington, put the matter very plainly back in 1948, he said: "The word to use is not 'subsidy,' the word to use is 'security.'

The world does not reward honesty and independence, it rewards obedience and service. It's a world of concentrated power, and those who have power are not going to reward people who question that power.

If you look at the results of human nature, you see everything:
you see enormous self-sacrifice, you see tremendous courage, you see integrity, you see destructiveness, you see anything you want. That doesn't tell you much.

When someone comes along claiming a scientific basis for some
social policy or anything else having to do with human beings, I'd be very skeptical if I were you.

For people to have the opportunity to live full and rewarding lives they have to be in control of what they do, even if that happens
to be economically less efficient.

The idea of developing the kind of society that Orwell saw and described in I think his greatest work, Homage to Catalonia - with popular control over all the institutions of society - okay, that's the right direction in which to move, I think.


The ones who are ruthless and brutal and harsh enough to seize
power are the ones who are going to survive. The ones who try to associate themselves with popular organizations and help the general population itself become organized, who try to assist popular movements in that kind of way, they're just not going to survive under these situations of concentrated power.

Notions like Marxism and Freudianism belong to the history of organized religion. So part of my problem is just its existence: it seems to me that even to discuss something like "Marxism" is already making a mistake. Like, we don't discuss "Planckism." Why not? Because it would be crazy.

It's extremely rare, outside of the natural sciences, to find things
that can't be said in monosyllables.

Eighty percent of Americans literally believe in religious
miracles. Half the population thinks the world was created a couple
thousand years ago and that fossils were put here to mislead people or
something - half the population. You just don't find things like that in other industrial societies.

If we ever had a popular reform candidate who actually achieved some formal level of power: there would be disinvestment, capital strike, a grinding down of the economy. And the reason is quite simple. In our society, real power does not happen to lie in the political system, it lies in the private economy: that's where the decisions are made about what's produced, how much is produced, what's consumed, where investment takes place, who has jobs, who controls the resources, and so on and so forth. And as long as that remains the case, changes inside the political system can make some difference - I don't want
to say it's zero - but the differences are going to be very slight.

Look, G.A.T.T. is something of major significance. The idea that it's going to be rammed through Congress on a fast track without public discussion just shows that anything resembling democracy in the United States has completely collapsed.

There is never any point in getting some person into office unless you can continue forcing them to be your representative, and they will only continue to be your representative as long as you are active and threatening enough to make them do what you want, otherwise they're going to stop being your representative.


There are parts of philosophy which I think I understand, and it's most
of classical philosophy. And there are things that I don't understand,
because they don't make any sense - and that's okay too, these are hard questions. I mean, it's not necessarily a criticism to say that something doesn't make sense: there are subjects that it's hard to talk sensibly about. But if I read, say, Russell, or analytic philosophy, or Wittgenstein and so on, I think I can come to understand what they're saying, and I can see why I think it's wrong, as I often do. But when I read, you know, Derrida, or Lacan, or AIthusser, or any of these - I just don't understand it. It's like words passing in front of my eyes: I can't follow the arguments, I don't see the arguments, anything that looks like a description of a fact looks wrong to me. So maybe I'm missing a gene or something, it's possible. But my honest opinion is, I think it's all fraud.

Anybody who wants to be President, you should right away say, "I don't
want to hear that guy any more." You should say, "I don't want to listen to that person any more." Anybody who wants to become your leader, you should say, "I don't want to follow." That's like a rule of thumb which almost never fails.


People should not be asking me or anyone else where to turn for an
accurate picture of things: they should be asking themselves that. So
someone can ask me what reflects my interpretation of the way things are, and I can tell them where they can get material that looks at the world the way I think it ought to be looked at - but then they have to decide whether or not that's accurate. Ultimately it's your own mind that has to be the arbiter: you've got to rely on your own common sense and intelligence, you can't rely on anyone else for the truth.


I think the smartest thing to do is to read everything you read - and that includes what I write, I would always tell people this - skeptically. And in fact, an honest writer will try to make it clear what his or her biases are and where the work is starting from, so that then readers can compensate - they can say, "This person's coming from over here, and that's the way she's looking at the world, now I can correct for what may well be her bias; I can decide for myself whether what she's telling me is accurate, because at least she's making her premises clear." And people should do that. You should start by being very skeptical about anything that comes to you from any sort of power system - and about everything else too. You should be skeptical about what I tell you - why should you believe a word of it? I got my
own ax to grind. So figure it out for yourself.